 Good evening, everyone. I'm Andrew Weiss, Vice President for Studies at Carnegie. I'm delighted to see friends in the audience and colleagues. Before we get started, if I could just make a small request. If you have a cell phone with you, if you could mute the phone, that would be much appreciated. We have two wonderful Russian colleagues speaking here tonight to present a new book. The compatriots, to my immediate right, is Andrei Soldatov, and co-author of the book, Irina Baraghan. I'm sure folks in this audience know both of their work as longtime chroniclers of the Russian and Soviet intelligence apparatus. This new book, which is available for sale after this evening's presentation, is a look at how the Soviet Union and then Russia have dealt with emigrant threats or perceived threats in the dissident movement and in the diaspora, and try to frame all these activities in a compelling way. And as a fan of spine writing, both historical and fiction, I found this very readable. And there's a lot in it, which is very new. But there's something about the writing style, which really pulled me in and was quite different from the way people normally talk about these issues. And Irina and Andrei have really put together a kind of historical picture, which goes back to the earliest days of the Soviet period. And find yourself, as you're reading it, certain characters who play these really interesting roles in dealing with emigres and white Russian opponents of the Bolshevik regime pop up in later sections of the book. And I won't spoil some of the surprises, but there's some very striking connections to some of the figures in Russia today, particularly in the opposition movement, who have very interesting relatives who go back into the Soviet intelligence apparatus to the foundational moments of the Bolshevik regime. So anyways, it's a real pleasure. I think Andrei and Irina will talk for a couple of minutes about the book and sort of describe why they pursued this project and what they're trying to get across in terms of putting this information out now. Obviously, in light of a series of Russian-attributed intelligence operations in the United States in 2016, in the UK in 2018, a lot of these issues don't seem exotic. They seem very relevant right now and are front and center in American political life and in our foreign policy. So anyways, it's a great privilege to welcome both Andrei and Irina to Carnegie. I'll let them speak for a few minutes and present the book, and then we'll have a little conversation. And eventually, I'll also open things up to folks who are here to ask questions. So anyways, welcome, Andrei and Irina. Thank you very much, and thank you, Andrei, for having us. And while Irina will start, I continue. Thank you for having us here. And when we decided to write this book, it was a very difficult decision for us. It was an extremely difficult choice because, you know, we are a Russian journalist who wrote two books, the first one on the security services, on the Russian security services, and the second one on the Kremlin slots on the internet. And we have been writing for the security services for years, but we have been so far from the immigration as you only could imagine, because no one in our family, no one in our family is emigrated, nor even included our aunties, uncles, and a dozen of cousins. And you know that a lot of people emigrated from Russia, and Russia has a search-laden diaspora in the world. And people emigrated from Russia for more than 100 years extensively, and there was a lot of reasons for emigration. There was a crazy, the Tsar's crazy policy toward Jews. The Russian Revolution, the First World War, Civil War, the Second World War, then crazy anti-Semitism in the Soviet Union. And all these reasons forced out of the country millions of Russians. But you know that in the 1990s, the emigration became, the emigration was in the center of, wasn't the spotlight because it was the first time when people were allowed to, it was the first time when people could flee the country absolutely free. And people started moving in the two directions. Most of them coming out of the country, but some of old emigrants, emigrants from the descendants of the people from the First Wave of emigration, they came back to Russia to capture the new opportunities. And why we decided to write the compatriots? As it turned out, in the 1990s, it was only a decade then they didn't have political emigration. When Putin came to power even 20 years ago, he immediately reintroduced political emigration. And already in 2000, he formed the first group of his political opponents fled the country. And simultaneously, because there were so many Russians abroad, Kremlin came to see the Russian emigration as a good recruit base and as a tool for widening its influence abroad. And the Kremlin created a concept of Rusky Mir, a Russian world, which is worldwide, Russian-speaking community, which is connected with Russian culture, with Russian history. And the Kremlin also sees this community as a recruiting base and as a network that could be used in the moment peaks. And so as a result of all this process, we got three things here. The first, Putin has been pushing for years his political opponents out of the country and sometimes literally putting them on the plane to take them out of the country like it happened with Russian oligarchs, Khodorkovsky. Second, once out of Russia, the exiles, these political exiles had presented a challenge to the Kremlin. And the Kremlin takes this challenge very seriously. And the Kremlin used all methods against these political emigrants, including intimidation, including spying and even poisoning. In our book, we tell a story of a young Russian opposition politician, Vladimir Karamurze, who now lives here in Washington. And he was poisoned twice when he visited Moscow. Fortunately, he survived and still lives here, lobbying extensively under the Kremlin. And finally, thanks to the long history of the Russian immigration, there are so many Russians abroad that the Kremlin sees them as opportunity to achieve Putin's domestic and international goals. So that's why we got interested in this issue and decided to write a book on this. And we spent many years writing about the Russian security services. And what we understood is that modern security services, modern Russian intelligence, are still very much like the QDB of the 80s. And you know that the QDB was the direct successor of the Stalin secret services. And Stalin's obsession with political immigration, with political exiles was a defining experience for Stalin's security services. And unfortunately, it still has a lasting impact on the modern Russian intelligence. Let me give one example that we have in our book. It's a story about Stalin's biggest rival, Leon Trotsky. When Stalin expelled Trotsky from the country, Trotsky continued his struggle against Stalin. And because it was very predictable that he was never going to stop. But at the same time, Stalin maybe didn't expect that. And after Trotsky, after Trotsky was expelled, he tasked many, many Soviet agents to spy on him and eventually kill him. But his obsessions with political emigrants and the Trotsky supporters was so big that the story after Trotsky's assassinations didn't stop the whole story. Because after Trotsky was killed in August 1940 in Mexico, many, many other Russian spies and Russian agents in the United States was tasked to continue spy on Trotsky supporters and Trotskies across the United States and across Europe. And for instance, there was a very distinctive example of it in January 1941. The Moscow Center sent a secret cable to the chief of the intelligence station in New York. And this cable urged the chief of the secret of the regime tour of the NKVD here in New York to keep on the struggle against Trotskies. It happened when the Second World War already started. And France was invaded. And it was only five months before the Germans attacked the Soviet Union. So unfortunately, this experience defined my assets of Soviet intelligence even after Stalin's death. And also, it has a big, a big lost impact on the modern Russian intelligence. As Irina said, our book focuses on one particular thing and a very broad topic of the Russian immigration, because it's really extremely big topic. And we are writing only about the political angle, the political opponents of the regime in Moscow. And we are also writing about the criminal's ways of dealing with the challenge posed by the Russians abroad. And to understand why it's such a bloody history, we need to talk first about the fear. And it's kind of ironic. So we have two things happening simultaneously. We have the Kremlin pushing his enemies and opponents out of the country, claiming they are not very important, and pose no threat to political stability in the country, and then get obsessed with them. And if there's a challenge, we pause and start from oligarchs like Gusinsky or Berezovsky or Khodorkovsky or journalists like Karamurza or politicians slash celebrity Gary Kasparov. And we all know that these people, they are not the most popular opposition politicians in the country. We have Alexei Navalny, who poses a much more dangerous and much more serious threat to the political regime. Yet the Kremlin found people who live now outside Russia dangerous. And the best way to explain this is the Kremlin's fear of the repetition of the 1917 revolution. It was quite clear when we got the centenary of the revolution two years ago that the Kremlin was not only the Kremlin, but the secret services and people we spoke to, we obsessed with the idea that a small bunch of people, actually, political exiles, not very important, not very powerful or rich, with some support from foreign hostile forces, could get to Russia and take over this mighty Russian empire with probably the most powerful secret police back then. And how we can exclude the situation that this situation and could be repeated at, that another group of political exiles could get back and, again, change the political regime in the country. Of course, we completely understand that it's a very historical explanation of what actually happened in 1917, but it hardly matters, because this is a perception we are dealing with, that a group of people who live out of the country have some support from the West. And I heard a lot from people at Lubyanka, that Leonion was, of course, just an agent of the German General Staff. And now it's a kind of semi-official line, judging the state TV. And this idea has a big impact inside of the security services, and they define, and they also have an impact on what the Kremlin thinks about challenges and threats posed by the integration. And these days, of course, the situation is quite unique, because the very first time in our history we have Russians in Washington and London and European capitals aspiring to have a say in defining these countries' policies towards Russia. And it makes some Americans very uncomfortable as we saw in the history of the Magnitsky Act. And of course, it causes a very hysterical reaction in the Kremlin. And these activities with quite this help or lobbying of the Russians here actually was quite successful. But that was the perception of the Kremlin. Let's talk also about reality, because what we tried to do in the book is also understand what the Russians have brought the capable of doing. And given the very long history of the Russian immigration, we can say that they actually were producing a kind of textbook of what could be done and what could not be done from abroad to affect the political regime in a country like Russia. Because of the last century, the Russian political emigre, they tried almost every trick. They launched a terror campaign. They sent undercover agents into Russia and killed Bolshevik officials in the country. When the Bolshevik and Soviet officials went to the West, they get killed by the agents of white emigre organizations. When the Soviet army got involved in some military conflict outside of the country, for instance, in Spain, some white organizations sent their soldiers and officers to fight them. When the Second World War started, some of these organizations actually took the side of the enemy, helping in all ways possible to destroy the Red Army. During the Cold War, they got engaged in propaganda in Spain, again at helping to launch radio stations. They sent balloons through the borders with leaflets, all kinds of activities. They're also trying to affect the public opinion in the West-based Asia. Manifestations, rallies, they even bombed an office of the Soviet trade organization in New York, trying to change the policy of the Soviet Union and of the United States. And now, given how many years passed, we can try to assess the effectiveness of all these efforts. And to be honest, we should say that most of these things were complete failures. And nothing worked out. And what we need to also add that the Russians abroad, they proved to be completely incapable of building political organizations in the West. They constantly argue it and intrigue it. They stage it, walk out protests. Too much of despair of the Americans who supported them like George Cannon. And if you try to sum up and to understand what actually worked, it looks like the only one thing. Once the Russians abroad or the Russian emigre acted as individuals and they smuggled their books or published their books in the West. That actually worked because that sometimes changed dramatically the public opinion in the West. We have an example of Alexander Solzhenitsyn. We have an example of Svetlana Aleluyeva, Stalin's daughter. They books actually had a big impact on what the West then fought of the Soviet Union and of what actually happened in the country. The collapse of the Soviet Union completely changed the game, as we know. But the way many Americans envisaged how what might happen after the collapse of the Soviet Union. For instance, George Cannon believed that the Russian emigre organizations and politicians from the emigration could get back and have a say in the political future of the country. Unfortunately, it never happened. So we had some people coming back, but it was completely insignificant. But what actually happened is that some of these Russians or the Russian Americans and we are focusing mostly because we have Russians in many countries, but our books is mostly about the United States and Russia. Many Russian Americans actually got back to Russia because they saw some new opportunities in the most interesting area, making money. Because these people actually understood very quickly that we have a knowledge of two worlds, of the West and East. We know the language, we know the habits, we understand how to behave in both civilizations. And they actually became instrumental in at least two things. Because back then, the country of Russia was in need of finding a way and opening the gate to move money out of the country to the West and moving the money from the West to Russia. And in both cases, the Russian Americans played an extremely important role, actually, they were instrumental. The interesting thing is that when they became so useful for doing these kind of things, it didn't end with money. And when Putin came to power, he understood that he can use some of his people to gain his political goals. And actually, some of the Russian Americans helped him to score very spectacular successes within the Russian diaspora here. And we tell a story in our book of the Russian Orthodox Church abroad. Because that was a very important thing for the Russians here and especially for the Russians in the Soviet Union, because it was an embodiment of the idea of another Russia. We had this idea back then, and I remember that as actually adolescent in 1991 and 1990. But we had this idea that the old aristocracy and the Russian Orthodox Church abroad, they actually presented a vision of the Russians who were completely uncorrupted by cooperation with communists. So we had some illusionary another Russia who could maybe have something to do with and maybe could help us to solve our problems. But Putin, of course, he didn't want and he didn't love the idea of different alternative versions. And he wanted one United Russia. And we tell a story how actually the Russian Americans helped Putin to eliminate the problem and to subordinate the church abroad to the head of the church in Moscow. And on the way, Putin also secured support of the descendants of the first wave of immigration, which was a very surprising thing, because their ancestors actually fled the country from Bolsheviks and Cheka. And surprisingly, many of them now they support Putin's policies not only in Russia, but also internationally. And for instance, many of them decided to support the annexation of Crimea. And in our book, we try to explain why. And finally, now we have this large community of Russians abroad who presents not only the challenge, but also the opportunity, as Irina said. And the Kremlin, over the 20 years, invested a lot of money into building these networks of compatriots. And in the Russian official parlance, there is a big distinction between the word emigre and compatriot. The emigre on the KGB language is someone who fled the country and stayed hostile to the regime in Moscow, and should be seen as dangerous. compatriot is something completely different. There's someone who actually could also move it out of the country, but stayed loyal to or decided to become loyal to the course of Moscow. Now we have lots of these networks. The most surprising thing, and the final thing I wanted to say, is that when we tried to find some case studies, how these networks were activated. And of course 2016 should have been the most interesting examples, the Russian interference and the US election, and we all know these stories about hackers. The most interesting thing is it looks like these networks were never activated in 2016. The big question is why? So we have our explanation that probably the Russian hackers were exposed so early, actually already in June, so that got some people in the Kremlin scared that they invested so much money and resources in these networks, and these networks could be so easily exposed that they decided not to use them. But still it's a very open question because the networks are there. OK, so I have a very simple question. I'm going to have a very complicated lead up to the question. The simple question is why all the killing? And the favorite scene for me in the book is a lunch at a restaurant in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn in August of 2000, where a Soviet and then eventually Russian SVR officer, who's the deputy resident at the Russian mission in the United Nations, Sergei Teretekov, has lunch with two visitors from Moscow, Viktor Zolotov and Evgeny Murov, who are two, if people don't know, closest aides to Putin, who have been his bodyguards, but also over time have become force under themselves. And one now leads something called the Russian National Guard, which is essentially a Praetorian Guard. And in this lunch where these security services people are getting together in a Russian restaurant, a very classical Soviet intelligence operative who's served overseas is dealing with these two heavies, who are the guys who protect the body of the president and who are providing leadership security. And he's kind of, how do I put this in a polite way? He doesn't see them as his peers. He sees them as from a very different cadre with very different training. And one of them starts to brag about how good he is at martial arts and how he's able to kill a man with his bare hands. And at the lunch table hits the Soviet now Russian intelligence operative with a martial arts slap at his temple and knocks him out of his chair. And I believe he's unconscious. Why all the killing in the Putin era? Is it a byproduct of changes in who's leading the security services or is it fit within? And there's another section of the book, sort of bureaucratic inertia, which is this is how it's always been done since the Soviet era, targeted killing is an important part of how the Soviet and then Russian regime neutralizes threats. You know that it was a big myth. And we also are telling this story in a book that in the big, large apparatus of the KGB, the foreign intelligence was the most liberal part of the KGB because these guys served in the West and they knew the rules and they tried to play by the rules. And it was absolutely fake. It has nothing to do with reality. The only reason why we had this myth is because the foreign intelligence was so scared after 1991 that we wanted to present this image to the society and not to be completely disbanded because we really feared that they could be disbanded or sent to jail just as haven't been by their colleagues from Stasi. And actually, if you look at the history of the Russian intelligence and the methods and people who are still cherished inside, most people are killers, unfortunately. And we are telling this story about several people who then became well appraised by the Soviet intelligence and Russian intelligence because of some big success stories like Adam Espionage. And when you look deeper, you see that these people actually were involved in very nice things here, not only in collecting intelligence and recruiting people, but actually when they were asked to give a hand and to kill somebody like dissidents or communists who are actually not extremely loyal to Stalin, they helped it and they did that. And there was no problem for them psychologically or culturally. It is in, I think it was a defining moment for Soviet intelligence and it's still there. The only part of the KGB surprisingly, which was never reformed, is the intelligence branch. So yes, we have this conflict that people like Tretikov tried to fancy themselves in the 1990s that they could be someone similar to, say, CIA officers. And we want, and they're always a lover to tell about themselves that, well, we are colleagues, we are doing the same thing, we are playing the same game. You have James Bond, we have our guys, so they're basically the same business. No, it's completely different business because the very first thing for the Russian intelligence was always from the day one of the establishment of foreign intelligence, was to secure political regime in Moscow, protecting it from counter-revolutionaries. And counter-revolutionaries were, of course, first of all Russians, and you can use, and they used all kinds of means, including killings. So the natural corollary or companion question to why all the killing is why all the sloppy killing? And if you wanted Sergei Skripal to take an example to walk out of the pub in Southern England and get hit by a car or some mugger hit some over the head with a brick, there are ways to do things that don't involve using nerve gas that created a huge public safety threat and killed innocent people. The former Russian intelligence officer, Alexander Liffnenko, who was killed with polonium in a London hotel could have been dealt with in a different way. All of these actions leave a very big set of fingerprints and signatures that make everyone say this is a Russian government directed action whether it's coming from Putin himself or people below him unclear, but it's very clearly a state action. Why and to what benefit is sloppy activity being conducted? And there was an article last week, which I assume you read by Michael Schwartz in the New York Times in which there's this debate at the very end about, yeah, it's really sloppy, what they're doing, maybe the sloppiness is the message. Is the sloppiness the message? That's not an easy question because when it happened for the first, it was Alexander Liffnenko. From the first side, it was, they accept it as a message because to use polonium as a poison means that you want to leave some tracks, that some traces that could be for sure exposed later because polonium has a long, polonium couldn't, traces of polonium couldn't disappear in the next year, so in the next five years, even many years ahead. But on the same time, now when we know what happened after Liffnenko killings, we see that people who were involved in these killings, they got away with this. And even a reaction from the United Kingdom towards the Russian authorities was very weak. And there was some scandal, but there was not huge big sanctions or some really hard political actions against the Russian authorities. So it was, maybe the traces was, I don't think that Lugavoy or other people who were involved in this killing, they planning that they will be exposed. But at the same time, maybe people who were in charge of the whole operations gave in their mind, kept in their mind that maybe the first, maybe the first example, the first testing ground for checking what would go on after that. And after it happened and there was no strong reaction from the last, they just understood that it could happen again and again. So there's a third companion question to why all the killing, which is, is it effective? Is the desired effect of attacks on dissident figures or opponents of the regime changing the nature of their external threat? I mean, you can open any newspaper in America and in Russia, you can go on the internet and read all sorts of horrible things about the Putin regime and corruption and all the problems that have accumulated over two decades. People are not staying quiet, right? And inside Russia, you see a very vocal grassroots counter reaction to the pressure from above. Are these tactics no longer calibrated to or geared toward the real threats that the regime faces? I mean, one of the ways to think about it, which I think is very useful is the regime is barely touching its repressive apparatus to restrain domestic political opponents. So, but they're using these tools that are so extravagant and disproportionate and arguably counterproductive because they're making Russia more of a bad guy and it makes it harder for a Western government that wants to work things out, like Donald Trump, to do that in the context of a country which is acting so recklessly. So I'm just sort of curious if you feel these tactics are from a 10,000 meters level seen as having secured the regime, which is obviously the daily preoccupation for Putin or are they counterproductive in terms of making the regime more isolated and more of a rogue power in the eyes of the international community? To be honest with you, I think that Skripal poisoned and changed everything because when we started the research for the book and we spoke to many prominent, aiming race and just people who played some role in this story. Every one of them in the end of the interview asked the question about Skripal, why it had happened. Sometimes it was really strange and very terrifying. For instance, I had lunch with a guy, he is a very prominent priest and he helped, he's a Russian American and he didn't want to meet me. He was very hesitant and he actually, he secured this reunion of two churches and we met in Moscow and he started our conversation in a very strange way. He said, Andrej, you have a very powerful enemies. That was his first line and when we ended, the very last line was, Andrej, you have some context inside, maybe you can explain what actually happened to Skripal and why he was visibly scared. So most of these people got this message that now everything could happen to them but the states would never stop with anything and it's very random. You cannot predict things, you should only guess and of course it's a big thing because it instigates self-sundership and people who actually could play a bigger, more prominent role because we are talking not only about activists. Of course we have activists in Moscow who are protestant but when you're talking about someone who are big players who try to establish and support some organizations here or in Russia, they all understand that now, well, we have this risk and we need to think about this risk. I remember that Khodorkovsky told me that his biggest, actually he was very pessimistic about what actually could be done from abroad. The only thing he said he could do or he could take the hit, he said. Look, if some Russian journalist or some people, some activist have something really explosive, I can take responsibility and again, he mentioned Skripal. So it looks like this big community of Russian immigrant community which is really big and getting bigger after 2014, they are thinking now that yes, this is something we need to deal with and to live with. So the other side of the coin in the book is a focus on active measures and disinformation and the book makes a pretty powerful argument about how these tactics were formative and you have a very good phrase in the book. You call it the foundation stone of Soviet intelligence. Can you talk a little bit about the formative initial or origins of these tools and the fact that there's current incarnation has become far more powerful and more effective probably than even the original Soviet masterminds could have dreamed that they would be? Actually it was a very important thing not for the Soviet intelligence but for the Russian intelligence. In 1990, actually in 1990 already, the Soviet intelligence in Yasenyeva, the leadership of the intelligence branch understood that they're probably facing the fate of Stasi and they need to find a way how to deal with this threat and they made a very interesting decision. They understood two things that Gorbachev would never support them actually and that they should forget about the big KGB that they need to save themselves. And what they did, they developed a plan and how to save the intelligence branch from reform and from possible prosecution. And the interesting thing, who was tasked? What kind of department inside of the intelligence was tasked to develop this plan to save the intelligence? It was a disinformation unit because the idea was that we need to go public to save the public about what we are doing and to actually to send this message to everybody and they actually were really, really good at it. They sent this message to the Russian public and also they sent this message to the West and we have this story in the book how actually they sponsored the publication of several books in the UK and US why to watch as a reputation of Soviet intelligence and the idea was one, how to save the intelligence and they succeeded. So it became a founding moment and found in constant of the Russian intelligence and the disinformation unit, which actually was from the beginning of the Soviet intelligence was never disbanded despite the fact that Americans, as we know, asked it after the collapse of the Soviet Union to disband this unit. It was just renamed and as we know from our contacts and sources from inside it was always active and it's getting more and more active. There's a really other powerful moment in the book which was new to me and at least if I'd known about it I'd long forgotten it. In 2000, I think it was 2001 when Putin goes to a meeting in the Hall of Columns and you mentioned this a minute ago in your introduction but in this conversation with emigres or compatriots Putin uses the words Russian world or Ruskimir for the first time and I'll just sound naive for a minute when I first started noticing this embrace of white Russians and opponents of the Bolshevik regime and they built a nice bookstore in Moscow and Taganka where you can go and buy emigre literature and there was a kind of heyday of republishing emigre literature from the 1920s and I'm a big fan of that and so I thought, wow, this is very interesting it's kind of ideologically heterodox move. How much do you believe that that was play-acting and was not well supported by Russian either bureaucratic resources or administrative support and how much do you believe it was part of some big Veltum Shung that they've had in their heads starting at the earliest time because I mean the meeting in the Hall of Columns is in is it in 2000 or 2001? 2001, October of 2001. Obviously in the war in Ukraine, Putin starts talking and acting like Molosevich and saying we have all these compatriots and we need to be ready to use military force to defend Russian speakers and it's just enough to know Russian to be defended at that point militarily so I'm just curious how much do you think some of this is the kind of decorative side of the state's ideology going back to the earliest days of Putin and how much do you think was as you were saying in the 2016 case building networks, kind of creating capabilities that down the road could be activated if needed? I think that back into the 2001 it was not so sophisticated as it now is and his ideology was not the same he had been developing for all these years and that time remember what time it was it was a chaos, economic chaos after the huge crisis in 1998 it was a war in Chichnaya it was an apartment building that was bombed in Moscow and there was a mass and but at the same time during the late Gorbachev era and during the nineties the idea that the other Russia white immigrants could help us to construct the new Russian ideology and to recreate the new strong country was very, very strong and many people believed in this concept and included Putin as I know the KGB office's ideology and which is also partly Putin's ideology they, these people don't love Russian revolution that's very strange but they don't recognize Russian revolution as achievement at all but they love the Lenin's security secret police Chikar and all its successors starting with Ogapov and Karaday and to the KGB and so when Putin talked about this I thought he was very sincere and we all know that he put a lot of attention to the Russian philosopher Yin which was a representative of white immigration and he also put a lot of efforts and he really organized and he moved the remnants of the prominent Russian immigrants and prominent Russian aristocrats and Tsar's generals to Russia and it was that time state propaganda, state TV covered this issue extensively so I think he was very sincere but after that of course many years, some years past 10 years or 12 years of course the issue of the huge presence of Russian immigrants abroad started considered as a recruiting base as a network of people who could be useful for the regime for its influence abroad and sometimes for domestic issues but not from the beginning in the beginning I think he was looking for some new founding stones for new Russia that could be more strong than Yeltsin's Russia Actually I just wanted to add that when Putin went to this congress in 2001 and when he saw that the minister in charge of organizing this congress invited too many people from former Soviet republics he was so angry because he expected to see the descendants of the white immigrant community the second wave, the fourth wave mostly from the US but not these people from Kazakhstan or from the Baltics so that actually he decided to dismiss the minister in charge and it was very clear the other thing probably you remember that back when the prominent Russian writer Edward Limonov actually promoted the idea of helping the Russians abroad meaning first of all actually now if you compare what back when Limonov said we have what Putin said now it's exactly the same thing we need to help the Russians abroad because they are persecuted in the Baltics and we should use all kinds of means including military and he was put in prison by Putin because he was not yet ready for this kind of development So I have two more questions then I'll open things up the first one is there's always been this notion that living in a besieged fortress of Krishnaya Krepos is politically convenient for the regime because it says we're surrounded by enemies and we need to unite and we're not going back to the 1990s and only through unity can Russia consolidate itself and Putin is the person who can do that successfully but the tactics that are in the book that are written about every day on our newspaper suggests intense levels of insecurity and paranoia about the West about color revolution but there is this kind of unresolved tension about how real that fear is and I'm just curious having looked at this issue historically if you come to a conclusion about how real the worry and existential fear is Well, I think it's there's a big problem here in the room kind of elephant in the room and it is a question why the Soviet Union collapsed actually you have this idea that it was such a great Soviet empire I mean judges of the state television and what Putin says and his people and of course the biggest and the best part of the Soviet empire was the key GBA which was the most intelligent and the most powerful security apparatus in the world so how could it happen that actually without almost no shorts it's just collapsed there should be some explanation for that and the problem is that for all these years people from the security services they are struggling to find the proper answer and that actually creates a big void because it means that this thing could happen again for completely unclear reasons so all of a sudden you can get in here in the center of Moscow millions of people protesting and now they throw off regime and I mean and toppling of another monument to another Tsar or some Soviet leader and another Maidan and nobody knows how it could start and that is a big problem because the KGB actually and the people from the AFSB never explained to themselves even to themselves what actually happened why they did nothing to save the country or to save the political regime they actually they claimed they would protect this regime until the last I don't know a cup of blood and they did nothing so last question I hate to bring today's news in but I can't resist you almost couldn't write a better script for Russian interests than what's happening right now where the US relationship with Ukraine is being systematically politicized and deconstructed you have foreign interests that seem to have had access to the president himself for his direct inner circle is this a Maidan Ukraine political crisis or is it something bigger than people currently understand? We're talking about Julianne. As I get your questions I was hinting on these two emigrants from the former Soviet Union who were the people who connected to Julianne who got them on this candle. And it's a little bigger than that, yeah but yes, that's a good starting point. So because emigrants also leave on the edge on the crosspoint between two walls and if they want to take part in the history or enrich themselves or make themselves famous or prominent, they of course earlier or later they of course will be involved in politics and they can and they could offer their influence for the politicians in Ukraine or for the White House as it happens representative of White House as it happens here and there is nothing unusual in that because emigrants are always, I mean political emigrants and people, they should be political. So it's a pity that it happened between Ukraine and the United States. Andrei, do you have a... I think we have a story in our book which sort of explains this strange... because there are different levels of this story and one of them which is striking for us is psychological, that we have these two guys which were so ready to take part in any kind of questionable activities. It looks like they have no reservations about anything. And I think the problem is that we have this kind of story in our book where we had a guy who got back to Moscow to make some money and he ended up just because he wanted to be so useful in two of these walls that first he helped Putin to get control of the Russian independent television when he was kicked out still he decided that the most important thing for him was to stay useful so he helped Putin to unite these two churches and he still, he tries to be extremely useful and it looks like it's actually he tried to describe his mentality in his business, a political agenda is just to be always to be at ready. If you want something which I could give you, I'm here to help. And that's his main message and I think it's a problem when you have people who are stuck between these two walls, as Rina said. And you were talking about Boris... And Boris Jordan. Boris Jordan. And that's the end of the history, maybe it's not the end of the history, but what's happening now is interesting. He sells pot in Canada and the United States. Yeah, he's developing this kind of marijuana business. Marijuana business. He's the top company that sells pot. Okay, so let's open things up a couple of requests. First of all, just wait for the microphone. Two, if you could state your name and affiliation. And three, if you could end things with an actual question. I'll start here with David up front. Okay, I just want to ask about something you said. I was sort of struck that you said that they weren't after this, but as we know, so much was done. First agency, all that was done. So what might these networks have done if they had been after this? This is not at all clear, there's a lot of blood. Well, you have networks of, you have people who actually might do something visible. For instance, we have, now you have in the United States, you have his ninth of May parades and you have the public campaign which we call the Immortal Regiment, which means that you have thousands of people marching the streets of say, New York, with the portraits of the veterans of the Second World War. We have Russian-Soviet flags and it's kind of projection where, well, you need to remember, you Americans need to remember that you should be grateful. But actually it's a projection of Putin's agenda because right now what we do and what kind of calls we use, it's the thing we haven't done, but unfortunately, it's not anymore about the memory of the Second World War. It's about Donbass, it's about Ukraine and Crimea. So there's a visible part. So you can use these networks for manifesting something for propaganda reasons, but you can also use these people for connecting people for espionage and these is much less visible. And until we have some investigations, I mean by law enforcement, if you have some new facts, that could probably make the picture more clear. But of course if you have people in so many areas, from business to, most of all from business and actually the whole thing about Trump, prove it to us one thing, that if you have business connections, actually you have connections everywhere. You don't need to go to government these days. So I think it's a very interesting story, but as I said, it looks like for some reasons, there was a decision not to activate these networks, probably because the idea was to build these networks for espionage always was valued more than propaganda in the intelligence branch of the Soviet Union and the Russian Federation. So probably maybe just save it for more prominent usage. Do you, just to tag onto David's question though, a lot of what was done by the internet research agency was very blatant and Putin told jokes about it in public when asked about the leak of democratic parties' emails. He just sort of said it's important that this information is out there because it shows there's corruption and it doesn't matter who took it and released it. Again, there's no effort to be sneaky. There's very little effort to be covert. It's basically painting a big sign on himself and saying I'm messing with something that is very sacred. Is that, again, part of a signal or is that a view that this was going to be not very consequential, that it was just a payback for some other alleged horrible thing the United States had done to Russia in the last 25 years? We have this image of Putin, of the late 2000s that he thinks only about international affairs because he's such a big established figure and he wants to play this big role globally. But actually the thing he mostly concerned is the situation inside. So he always has two audiences. Of course he has audience here in the West but he needs to think about the audience in Russia. And the most striking example, how different could be the message and how differently the message might be taken by the audience here and in Russia is the scandal with the Russian illegals in 2010. Remember this story, 10 Russian spies were caught by the FBI and it was such a big scandal when they were swapped and we have Anna Chapman, this kind of thing. The interesting thing to me back then was that this story was portrayed as victory by both countries. So you have, well it's quite understandable why it was a victory for the FBI because they caught these guys. I sort of understand why it was a big victory for CIA because when some people were swapped we got some of the spies from Russian prisons to the US and UK. So that seems logical and clear but why this story should be played as a victory and accepted as victory in Russia? And it was accepted, why? Because how it was played in Russia, the message was, look, we are back, we are capable again to send our people to the United States just like in the old days. And lots of people in Russia got really excited. And now we have these people like Bezruka for instance on Russian TV, talking, well telling his stories, how good he was as a spy, which is ridiculous but still it's a very big thing for the Russian, for the mentality, for the Russian audience because it helps you to feel, well part of the big country which actually could do things which makes you a great power which means to send your spies for decades to live in the United States. Probably doing nothing, but still. Well no, but it's even worse than that. I mean these people were all under surveillance for years, didn't notice, and so it should have been very humiliating. I think it's more, it's more an illustration of how no one ever gets fired and no one ever gets embarrassed, right? And so you can be as incompetent as any number of people and no one ever, they get promoted, they get in medals. The history of Russian intelligence full of history of many things. For instance, some years ago, the Russian intelligence looked frantically for an inspiration because we wanted to celebrate, it was the 19th anniversary of the establishment of the Russian intelligence. So what we wanted to say to the public that we want to recruit loyal Russians to become Russian spies. And we needed to choose a big example of a loyal compatriot, of a loyal patriotic Russian who spied successfully in the West. And they picked up Kim Fillion. He was not Russian. Just he cannot be played and he cannot be portrayed as a patriotic Russian who spied for the motherland. But still he is now an official number one here. His plaque is posted on the wall of the ACR. Martin. Thank you. I'm Martin Bengson from Sweden here in the private capacity. I have not yet read your book but I look forward to do so. Thank you for doing this talk. Is there, do you bring it up in the book or do you have any take on the risk which is much debated in or discussed in Europe about the ability of the Kremlin to make use of the Russian organized crime emigres? Given the history of the Russian secret services, especially Russian intelligence, they use every person they can do and criminals included. And there are a character in the book named Naum Ettingon who was extremely talented operatives and was in charge of the Torsky scale and he had a deal with criminals and abroad on the permanent base. But frankly speaking, so in terms of tradition, it's okay, it's normal. But we don't have a lot of examples in the recent history when the criminals and criminals were used by Russian intelligence. And I know that you mean this last case when a man was caught in Berlin after he killed a Chechen refugee and former... Militant, Chechen militant. There was a former Chechen militant because it is still unclear. If he was a criminal or not, we don't know, so far we don't know for sure. So I don't want to conclude that it is not a way of operation for the Russian intelligence. We can't say it now. Please, back down. Natalia Rostolo, journalist. Please tell us what's going on with your book in Russian. Yeah, we hope that's a strange way how our books actually finally reach out to our audience in Russia. We write our books in English because it's, to put it politely, difficult to get a Russian publisher for our books. I mean, to be the first publication in Russian. So the way we do that, we publish our books in English and then we wait passionately for some Russian publisher to buy the license and to translate it back into Russian, which seems a very crazy way to get back to your audience. So you are a Russian journalist and you're sitting in Moscow and you're writing something in English and then you wait this book to get published and translated by someone into your language. But unfortunately, it's the only way. So far, it works for us. So we got both of our books, the new Nabileti Android, we have published in Russian just with a year delay, right? So we expect something like that this year, this time. Okay, well, Andrei, Irina. Oh, there's one more question. I'm sorry, Andrei. Hold on, wait for the microphone, Andrei. The wonderful lunch is also here. It's out in the U.S. We're out writing. The idea is that it was a kind of new way of intelligence or character and so on. But it seems to us that it was not enough. It was the same school. So maybe my point is a little bit about this, but what is common and what is different? This intelligence world prying is different. Prying is a different thing. But what is common, what is different? What is new? What is novel, or innovation, or what would say social innovation in this world, right? And especially also in the human years, teaching or maybe I could not understand quite well, because it is mistaking that the right in 1999 was built in the kind of stairs that have apartment bomb in it. Right, was it surprising, Mr. Pippin? The apartment bomb is just... Was it a surprise or not for him? It was a cause and people might and then people... So it was a mess in Russia and people accepted it very... That it was a fear and people were driven by fear when they went to the voting, when they went to the ballot, to the polling stations, they were very much driven by fear. And a lot of that was a very sad time for us then, because people started talking and discussing, normal people, liberal people started talking and discussing that Russia need some kind of dictator like Pinochet, who can't protect them from both threats, economical crisis, economic crisis, and bombings, church and terrorism, things like that. That's what I meant. It's not, it's not... I don't mean that health and government was terrible and in charge of all these things, no. It's not that. But just keep it short, Andre. Okay. Okay. So that's a good question. You are talking about the killings and bombings that affected my question as well, Mr. Pippin. From your point of view, both the United States, only these department bombings could be killed by intelligence sources, whatever they are, by themselves, or they need to get some kind of transmission from the government. I mean, from the director, just what was the sense that you thought it was possible? And then, no, no, no, it's applies to these issues of the department of bombings, they're probably burdened to a bombing in 95, 96 people, you remember the most, the first verdict of a bombing at the railway bridge. So this part of the so-called guilty, all these bombings and killings could be formed without prior knowledge and permission from the very top of the guilty of the bombings. Okay, let me start with your first question about what actually, what Putin brought to intelligence and what actually happened is, if we try to define a new element and what we got in intelligence operations because of Putin is that because of Chechen wars and actually it happened with all security services in the world, including Russian, when they're dealing with terrorist threat, they're getting more brutal, especially if there is no other side. So what actually happened is, they started recruiting a lot of people from special forces to be intelligence operatives and this kind of training has nothing to do with intelligence collection. It's all about killing people, actually. So it sort of coincided with Putin and it was his idea also and I remember that actually it was a very popular thing back then in the early 2000s. I remember my meetings with some very high level officials from the FSB, how excited we were with the experience of Israel. We said, wow, we should do like just like Massad does and it was really surprising to me because given the usual anti-Semitism and the FSB to see some general from the FSB to be excited by the Israeli intelligence, but he was excited. He wanted to do exactly the same and when we got some Chechens, Yandar Bif actually, bombed in Qatar in 2004, it was made with jubilation inside and it was also failure because the guys could be caught. Nevertheless, we were given red carpet when we got back. So there was this climate where now we can get tough guys with experience in Chechnya and they can do something in intelligence field. What is not new is actually what we, probably we didn't have these only in the 80s or maybe the last half of 70s. Actually, if you look at the history of the Russian intelligence, we had this periods of time when people, for instance, right after the war, Second World War, lots of people we have experienced in the war. They recruited to kill in Munich, first of all. Ukrainian activists and Russian dissidents and these people were experienced military officers with military experience in the war and they were really, they were very proud of themselves. And some of them actually established the Russian special forces, Spetsnaz, the GRO. So you have these connections. It was always there. That was my point. That, yes, Putin get to this, but it was a way he knew from people who started the whole thing in the 20s and 30s and 40s. So probably the character of the intelligence service was never actually that changed. There was always this element there. Probably sometimes it was not that activated because they didn't want to kill everybody in the 70s and 80s, but it was always there and people that trained it to remember that it was there. Putin just activated the whole thing. And the question about bombings. Was the Apartment Bombing surprising for Putin? Apartment Bombing in 1999 surprising for Putin. I don't know yet because these, these were the only terrorist attack which was investigated by the Russian authorities. And the traces lead us even not to Chechens, but to the North Caucasus Republic of Karachevich-Rkessia. And the investigations was quite detailed. But our opinion, like in the early 2000s, was that it was surprising for Putin. But because he used these bombings for his own profit and this terrible terrorist attack helped him to create the strong hierarchy and to reinforce his authoritarianism in the country. So the more time passed, the more doubts exist. So we don't know so far. I don't think we... There's some hacking on these bombings. Of course, there are so many things. For instance, the FSB immediately started silencing people who asked questions about the bombings. And the Russian lawyer, Mikhail Tripashchev, was put in jail just because he started asking questions. And of course, it does look really great if you are completely transparent and you think you have done nothing wrong. But I think we have this investigation about properly done at, say, three levels. But we do not know what actually happened. Well, for instance, the Karachaychir-Kassan community was the very first Islamist, not nationalistic but Islamist Jihadist community in the North Caucasus. They were extremely capable. They actually carried out several attacks beyond the borders of the republic. And they were much more sophisticated than Chechens. The problem was that there were so many questions. For instance, Boris Berezovsky was actually a member of parliament elected in this republic. He was instrumental to bring Putin to power, to some extent. Can we speculate what he had something to do with that? I think it's too thin. I think it's too many conspiracy theories here. And I think still we have all these questions. And the final point in this investigation is not yet there. So that's a really good note to end on. Andres Soldatef, Irina Baragan. Please join them in the back and buy copies of the compatriots. Thank you all for coming tonight. Thank you, Andrea. Thank you. Thanks.